Dawson Filter as He Relates to Spoons

Dawson Filter, Sylvester Denny, Babe Listowel, and Twelve-Anne Stradivari sat at a table to discuss the MacGuffin of their story, the True Meaning of Feelings.

“Well, we did have that time machine a while back. Doing stuff with that again could be a neat idea,” Twelve-Anne said.

At that moment, Babe Listowel returned from the future to give himself a better time machine than the one of which Twelve-Anne spoke.

“Hello, self,” he said, “your time machine before was pretty lame, what with all the problems and stuff. Take this one, on me; and come to 22:13 17 March 2051 at the only barbershop left in the world when you find the True Meaning of Feelings.”

Babe Listowel looked at the time machine he’d just given away, wondering how he was going to get back, when he arrived again to whisk himself away.

Dawson Filter, having regained his memories since Dawson Filter As He Relates To Sheep, remembered Felipe, an intern of sorts who went along on the quest for a little while until he just didn’t.

“Why don’t we just give the time machina to Felipe,” Dawson Filter suggested, “so that he can swoop in and save us if we ever get in a real jam?”

The others nodded in agreement, and did the thing that Dawson Filter suggested. Once they returned, they decided to end the day on a high note with a 3951.07 Hz picnic.

“Blasts!” Babe Listowel lamented, “I’ve forgotten the spoons.”

Just as he said this, Felipe, an intern of sorts, arrived, threw the crew some spoons, smiled, gave a thumbs up to indicate that he was indeed happy, and left. Dawson Filter caught one of the spoons and used it to bite into his sandwich, when he began to have an identity crisis.

“Aughbnnhv, man,” he said, “I don’t have a personality yet, do I?”

Everyone thought for a moment (90 seconds) before simultaneously saying an assortment of things, all of which amounted to “No.” They realized that none of them had as clearly defined personalities as they might like, and so commenced a meeting. They determined that at this point, Twelve-Anne’s personality was as the vaguely nice person in their posse; Sylvester Denny used to be somewhat victimized in the story, but recently morphed into a completely faceless zombie with no meaningful dialogue; Babe Listowel was once a super-hip rocker/magician who experienced a similar fate as Sylvester; and Dawson Filter was pretty much nothing the whole time.

Seeing that I had done very little to flesh out their characters, they decided to write their own back stories to help define themselves, taking inspiration from things they’d noticed about themselves since they’d started the quest.

Babe Listowel chose to have been born and raised in Oslo, where he learned the art of slight of hand and that true magic lives in the spirit of rock and roll. He was to be alternately emphatic and stoic; and ever at war with the establishment while scorning mercenaries.

There was a general consensus that Twelve-Anne Stradivari should be aggressively polite, and place a high priority on planning things. She made a note to herself to remember to bring the spoons next time as Sylvester Denny suggested that she could also be pretty good at art.

Sylvester Denny, it was decided, was poor at communication and good at ideas. He was to be anxious, but was still generally a merry individual.

Dawson Filter, because of his extensive knowledge of rocket science, was decided to be a rocket scientist. His ideas tended to be more focused on progressing toward a goal than Sylvester’s, and less concerned with escaping danger. In creating ideas, he placed a high priority in approaching tasks logically; although the logic of the task itself was of little importance as long as it was of a reasonable amount of interest, and he was willing to follow the plans of others without observing any traces of logic.

Now that the quartet were ready to function as normal members of society, they continued planning their intergalactic quest to find and record the True Meaning of Feelings.

Don’t dwell on the past, man. So Dawson’s race is a little fluid. So Felipe was there and then he wasn’t. So Babe suffered a gaping head wound,was abandoned on the surface of the moon without medical care or any of the things necessary to sustain life, only to inexplicably find his way back to the correct part of the Earth and story, suffering no apparent ill effects of any kind. No one cares. These things are in the past. The past is in the past, man (unless YOU have a time machine…do you have a time machine? If you do I would really love to back to 2 weeks ago so I could try to not lose my keys). What matters is right now, brother. Right now.